In the dead unhappy night, when he can't sit up on deck!
SUNDAY.
Ah! you've called me nice and early, nice and early, CURRIE dear!
What? Really in? Well, come, the news I'm precious glad to hear;
For though in such good company I willingly would stay—
I'm glad to be back in the bay, CURRIE, I'm glad to be back in the bay!
It is now somewhat more than fifty years since a young, and comparatively obscure writer addressed some presumptious lines to a lady of noble family, in which he sneered at her claims of long descent, ridiculed nobility generally, and concluded by advising her to go out amongst the poor, to teach the children, and to feed the beggars.
The tone of the poem was censorious and offensive; but Lady Clara Vere de Vere, to whom it was addressed, let it pass unnoticed by, knowing that "Everything comes to those who know how to wait," and now this last daughter of a hundred Earls has written a good-humoured rejoinder to the first Baron Tennyson, in which she playfully assumes her age to have remained what it was fifty years ago:—
Baron Alfred T. de T.,
Are we at last in sweet accord?